Summary

File size limit when copying to external hard drive

Description of the issue

I am trying to copy a 4.6 GB FM Pro Advanced 9.0v3 file to an external drive. I have a Mac running 10.4.11. When the transfer gets to 4 GB, the copying stops and I get the message "Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occurred (Error Code -1309)" The only work around I know of is to split the DB and then recombine them. As some of these are runtime versions, it's a pain. By the way, similar error occurs when trying to import more than 4 GB from the internal drive to an external drive. Is this an undocumented feature or is there some preference I need to set?

Does anyone know if there is a way to split your filemaker database into usable (<4GB) chunks that would work with FAT32? The only alternative I can think of is reformatting as NTFS and using something like NTFS-3G.

Using your 12GB file, pull down the File menu and select "Save a Copy As...". At the bottom of this dialog box, select the Type: "clone (no records) " . This makes a copy of your file without any records. In essence, a structure of your file. Since there is some overhead in the file, splitting this into three file would leave you a little over 4GB each, so you will need to split this into at least four files.

Create four "clone" files.

In your large 12GB file, find the first 1/4 of the records. For example, if there are 40,000 records, go to record 10,001, pull down the Records menu and select "Omit Multiple...". Omit 30000 records, and you are left with the first 10000 records. Open the first "clone" file and import from the main 12GB file. Since only 10000 records are found, the "clone" file will only import 10000 records.

VRL wrote:Does anyone know if there is a way to split your filemaker database into usable (<4GB) chunks

It depends on what your file contains and what you would define as "useable". If you have multiple tables, you could put each table in a separate file - the functionality of the solution wouldn't be much different.

Splitting records of the same table into separate files doesn't appeal to me - what if you need to perform a find?